A new book chronicles the affluent suburb’s strides toward desegregation. Are residents’ good intentions good enough?
In 1963, less than a decade after the first Black family moved into Ludlow, seventy-two per cent of the students at Ludlow Elementary were Black.Save this storyCan the good intentions of affluent liberals create integrated and equitable communities? This is the implied question that underlies so much of the current discourse on race and education.
Integration came to Shaker Heights in the mid-fifties, when a handful of Black families finally established a foothold in the town’s Ludlow neighborhood. White families began to sell their homes, spurred by aggressive real-estate agents who told them that it was only a matter of time before their block flipped from white to Black. Those houses, in turn, were mostly sold to Black families.
Shaker Heights’s commitment to a shared educational system became all the more notable because of the number of accomplished people who hail from there.was from Shaker Heights, as are the comedians David Wain and Molly Shannon, the rappers Machine Gun Kelly and Kid Cudi, and Gary Cohn, a former director of the U.S. National Economic Council.
For the past forty or so years, Shaker Heights schools have focussed their attention on reducing the achievement gap between Black and white students. Black students in Shaker Heights do better than Black students elsewhere, but they have not kept up with the “uber achievement” of Shaker’s white students. The achievement gap has become a constant and pernicious source of conflict in the community; there have been countless initiatives, meetings, and committees on the topic.
“Dream Town” shows that neighborhood integration necessitates class homogeneity, but even then it requires tireless effort to maintain. “I feel strongly that people ought to be economically integrated also, but I think if you bring that into this mix, then you’re going to hurt this mix,” one of Shaker Heights’s middle-class Black pioneers says in the book. “I mean, you know, somebody needs to do it, and I support it.
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